According to a recent study by the Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association (NYAMA), brands are struggling to collect and comprehend big data, to gauge the success of their marketing efforts and to make smart marketing plans, going forward.
This survey of senior marketing executives from large corporations was geared at gaining a greater understanding of how practices are evolving in these areas: data collection and usage; marketing measurement and ROI; and traditional-digital marketing integration.
Interestingly, three major challenges emerged:
- Brands are intimidated by big data. 29 percent reported that their marketing departments had little big data to look at, while 39 percent indicated that the data that they were gathering was insufficient, or already outdated. On top of that, marketers in the study admitted they are less likely to gather digital data than traditional marketing data.
- Digital integration is key, but how do we measure success? 51 percent of those surveyed are using mobile ads, but only a mere 17 percent are tying them to any sort of financial metric. Of the 85 percent using social networking accounts in their marketing efforts, only a small fraction (14 percent) attach them to financial metrics.
- ROI is often mentioned… but rarely understood. Nearly one-third (31 percent) of respondents defined ROI as a measure of their audience share. 28 percent base their marketing budgets on “gut instincts.” Remarkably, more than half (57 percent) don’t consider ROI in their planning at all.
Clearly, critical insights are being lost or ignored by many brands because of a chronic inability to gather and analyze big data.
Sure, they’re tired of missing out on these insights—and the impact these insights have on marketing planning and success measurement. But, the learning curve and the sheer weight of the information available continue to intimidate marketing teams into inertia.
Unfortunately, consumers are going to leave behind any brand that refuses to dig in . . . and the gap between companies that “do” use big data and those that “don’t” is only going to get wider. As technologies continue to evolve –becoming faster, more versatile and cheaper than ever before –big data’s role will continue to swell and consumers and retailers will begin interacting across an even wider array of channels both on- and off-line.
More and more, your customers expect a seamless experience no matter where they’re interacting with you. That mean you need to know:
- what they’re saying about what they need and want
- what they’re saying about you (and your competitors)
- what they expect from you
- what kinds of experiences they’ve had with you already, and
- how all those factors are working together to build (or jeopardize) your business.
In short, it’s time to embrace the omnichannel revolution. Marketing success increasingly depends on weaving together all the different components currently expanding the frontiers of digital marketing. It depends on gathering big data, analyzing big data and then, acting on those results in real-time. And it depends on combining all this –the “science” of marketing — with creative expressions of branding, positioning and go-to-market campaigns.
Image(s): FreeDigitalPhotos.net
About Lisa Arthur
Lisa,
I enjoyed your article. Clearly brands are beginning to look at Big Data. However, to me the most important aspect of this is understanding what Big Data is, and what they want to do with it.
Big Data is an interesting term that encompasses not only the increasingly large scale of traditional transactional data, but this brave new world we are all increasingly aware of that combines human interaction data (such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) with machine interaction data (such as GPS, mobile and sensor data). The potential for any business is profound and we are now witnessing new ways of processing these vastly different types of data for competitive advantage using new technologies such as Hadoop.
However, the first thing a brand needs to do is to understand the Big Data landscape as it applies to them, and determine what they want to achieve. For example:
1) Do they simply want to monitor their brand across the social networks?
2) Do they want to open new channels to market through social marketing and mobile marketing?
If it is simply the former, then sentiment analysis tools and other passive mechanisms allow them to achieve their goals. However, if it is the latter then more capability is required and brands need to look at their data capabilities in order to exploit the social networks and actually sell through these channels.
To assist in this world, a new term is coming to the fore called “Social MDM”. This enables brands to understand the single view of a customer within their own enterprise systems, but also extend it to embrace the social network of their customers. Now suddenly brands can offer products to their customers based upon what their customers’ friends are doing – which is vastly more powerful than simply recommending products based upon abstract buying patterns.
I think we are at the beginning of a brave new world in which brands will start engaging with their customers through social networks and mobile experiences. However, this require an amazing understanding of data and trust – data about their customers, and trust of their customers in engaging in this way!
Thanks for reading, Chris! Those are great points. I totally agree that strong organizations need to leverage Big Data, not only to monitor their brands but to actively reach customers wherever, whenever and however they want to be reached. Your Social MDM concept actually ties back quite well to a premise I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last few months: Intelligent 1:1 marketing. Essentially, the idea is that to reach customers in the most dynamic fashion, marketers need to tailor campaigns using the following equation: Intelligent 1:1 marketing = mobile devices + triggers + social media + point of sale data. (I wrote about this on Forbes a little while back: http://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaarthur/2011/09/14/the-next-big-thing-for-marketing/)
This allows brands to “embrace the social network of their customers” as you mentioned, and also combines that data with information from all other channels. When every channel becomes integrated, the customer experience becomes more rewarding for both marketers and the customers themselves, and Big Data is the key to unlocking these possibilities.
Lisa,
I think the key point here is integrating the various types of data in order to intelligently understand and embrace the customer. Technology has now evolved to the point where it can enable amazing engagement models linking, as you say, mobile devices, triggers, social data and point of sale data. But it always comes back to “the data”. We are going to see significant innovation in this area as brands embrace the different channels. No doubt, Big Data is changing the face of marketing